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Mirantis Makes OpenStack Distribution More Enterprise-Friendly

Marching toward hardening OpenStack to the point where the average IT organization can deploy it, Mirantis released version 7.0 of its distribution of the open source cloud software.

Amar Kapadia, senior director of product management for Mirantis, said this latest version of OpenStack from Mirantis, based on the Kilo release of OpenStack, is specifically geared toward enabling IT organizations to achieve operational stability using OpenStack.

“We’re trying to provide stability at scale,” said Kapadia. “We’re driving out all the intermittent bugs.”

Mirantis has also added several improvements to the Murano app catalog in OpenStack, including support for pluggable infrastructure orchestrators, improved role-based access controls and support for VMware and Windows apps.

While everything can be perfect when it comes to deploying any technology on the first day, Kapadia said, the real issues that IT organizations need to address start manifesting themselves on the second day after installation. For that reason, Mirantis in this release specifically focused on change management, updates, upgrades, monitoring, diagnosis, and workload deployment.

Mirantis has also improved its automated test suites, which now include tests for Murano, Sahara, and Ceph components of OpenStack and the back-porting select fixes from the Liberty release of OpenStack.

Mirantis has also enhanced its Fuel GUI to enable IT organizations to filter and sort nodes, which makes it possible for customers with large Mirantis OpenStack deployments to see their entire cloud on one dashboard.

Finally, Mirantis now supports NSX-v and vSphere distributed switch that interoperates with other software-defined networks (SDNs) based on Neutron, and there is also now a plug-in for Hadoop. Mirantis is promising in the next few weeks to support plugins for SDNs from Calico and storage systems from SolidFire.

In general, Kapadia said, Mirantis is not trying to use OpenStack to usurp platforms such as VMware, but rather support specific classes of cloud-native workloads that Mirantis contends will run better on OpenStack.

As the only remaining independent supplier of a distribution of OpenStack, Kapadia said Mirantis is also free from any legacy IT products or technologies that would inhibit its ability to keep pace with the latest OpenStack innovations, including being able to unify the management of containers using Kubernetes and a distribution of OpenStack that can run on any hypervisor an IT organization chooses to deploy.

While OpenStack has gained a fair amount of momentum in the past five years, challenges still remain in terms of ability of the average IT organization to deploy and maintain OpenStack. But with each passing release of the framework, the closer OpenStack becomes being able to be mastered by mere more IT administrators.